We’ve officially moved to DE2-115 boards to alleviate area pressure. This came with the realization that there was no way to cram what we wanted on to the DE0-CV without some serious area optimization, borderline impossible in the time we have left. In some cases we’d have to redesign portions of our subsystems from nearly the ground up so swapping to another board made more sense, given that they were available.
Additionally, synthesis, place, and route operations were taking ~40 minutes since Deanyone was compiling on a laptop (my desktop being left in Pittsburgh). By moving to the DE2-115, the compilation can be moved back into the ECE servers which makes it only ~15 minutes.
In general, this week was spent getting parts shipped and receiving parts from the campus and developing a new plan moving forward. We are re-considering how to manufacture our controllers now that TechSpark is closed and unable to provide the laser-cut parts we need. We are looking into internet vendors, much like how PCB designs can be out-sourced, for our laser cutting, potentially we may work with the course staff to get the parts manufactured using other tools.